The present invention generally relates to natural language processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to developing a parser for use in natural language processing.
Parsing assigns a structural description, typically in the form of a parse tree or a dependency tree, to a given sentence. A parsed sentence can be used in a variety of natural language processing applications including information retrieval, writing assistance, machine translation, questioning/answering, searching, and the like. Current parsers are trained using statistical or machine learning approaches on hand-annotated corpora. Hand-annotation of corpora requires a large amount of time and expense. Since hand-annotated corpora are expensive to generate, developing a parser based on automatic generation of training data would provide a parser that is less costly to develop and/or maintain.